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It's a topic that's worth several books, but I'll try to give some basic explanation of what I mean.
Basically, we tend to believe dogs view the world the way we do, that they understand our concepts of right and wrong, and therefore feel guilty when we come home and discover that they've chewed up our shoes. Our evidence for this is that they lower their ears and slink around or act placating when we get angry at them. Actually they are responding to our immediate anger, trying to avoid it. They don't connect that to the shoes.
The James Dobson example is pretty classic, in that he interprets the dog as having a "defiant" attitude and taking some kind of personal stand against him, the Boss. He assumes that 1) the dog has a concept of "right" (obedience) and 2) the dog deliberately made a decision to be "wrong" (defiance).
When we anthropomorphize dogs this way, we assume they can reason out what we want, and make a rational decision to go along or not. In fact, they simply respond to the immediate feedback they get from anything they do, and they interpret the feedback through their dog viewpoint. So, when they're chasing a squirrel and don't come when we call, it's not "defiance." They are simply responding to the more immediate feedback of "fast-moving prey that's fun to chase!" and they have not been given a good enough reason (on their own terms) to NOT do this. They will ALWAYS respond to the strongest stimulus according to the Dog List of Stimuli, not the Human Concept of Obedience.
Dobson gave the dog no reason to obey him. The dog had good reason NOT to obey him (the warm furry seat that it liked). Dobson may be able to talk to a kid and explain that it must go to bed because there's school tomorrow, and then have some reason to think the kid has deliberately defied him by not going. That's not the case with a dog.
A dog doesn't know tomorrow, it only knows NOW. What the dog understood at that moment is that it was in a comfortable place and had no reason to move, and then this huge guy threatened it when it was cornered. So it gave the dog's version of a warning to Keep Your Distance. This is very typical when one dog feels another is pushing too hard. A lift of the lip--Hey, you, that's too close, back off, you're making me nervous.
Then the big guy attacked. (A well-socialized dog would not have attacked; it would have backed off. A poorly socialized dog might have attacked.) Once attacked, the dog had no choice but to defend itself any way that it could.
I could go into the question of whether a dog should ever threaten any human in that way. (It should not.) That kind of behavior doesn't come out of the blue, though, out of a sudden decision by a dog to "defy" the human. It comes from poor socialization as a puppy, when any dog MUST be socialized heavily to humans and other environmental factors it will meet in its life. That's a topic in itself.
This dog was resource guarding its favored location. This is normal dog behavior, there's nothing psychotic or vicious about it, on dog terms. However, it's a problem for humans. It should be addressed specifically in two ways. First, making sure the dog has a "soft mouth" (best learned as a puppy) so that it doesn't bite down in aggression, and then by placement exercises in which, using positive reinforcement, the dog is given a REASON to move itself where the human wants it to move. Placement commands are things like, "in the car," "off the bed," "off the couch," etc. This should be done BEFORE there is a problem, ideally. But even after there's a problem, the approach should not be to think, "This dog is being bad! I'll punish it!"
An overly simplistic method to train this dog to get off the toilet seat would be:
1) when dog isn't on the seat, encourage it to hop on by patting the seat or whatever. Praise a bit for this (no food treat)
2) give your off cue ("hop down!" or such) while urging it by patting the floor, making nice alluring sounds, back away a bit, etc. When it gets off, give a food treat and make happy sounds. (Preferably don't lure off with the food, but if you must go to this in early trials, it's not the end of the world)
3) wash, rinse, repeat, until it is solid response to your cue
4) do surprise trials, at random times cue the dog on and then off the seat
You can do this with lots of different locations, like car, crate, etc.
The reason I said we cause dogs misery by some of our sentimental attitudes is that we expect too much of dogs. We expect them to simply understand that guarding their nest by growling is "bad." And if they don't understand this, and we can't figure out how deal with them, and then one day they bite a kid, they get taken to the pound and left there to their fate. When in fact some active work and time taken beforehand would have prevented the problem.
Sorry, I really haven't explained much, I really do think it's worth your time to read THE CULTURE CLASH. Because dogs are worth that much of our time, effort and understanding.
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